About the Author

Dr Muriel Newman

Dr Muriel Newman established the New Zealand Centre for Political Research as a public policy think tank in 2005 after nine years as a Member of Parliament. A former Chamber of Commerce President, her background is in business and education.

The colds winds of 2008

2008 was the coldest year this century. This is not an aberration as the global warming industry would have us believe. The world has been on a cooling trend since 1998 and there is now growing scientific evidence that governments around the world should plan for colder not warmer temperatures.[1] Yet, as is typical of emotion filled movements, it is hard to imagine cold hard facts getting in the way of the vested interests’ headlong rush towards costly and useless global warming taxation schemes – even here in New Zealand.

New Zealanders are pragmatic people. It probably comes with the territory – being at the bottom of the world means that we have to rely on our own ingenuity and common sense to overcome the challenges we face.

That is why it is so disturbing that the “global warmers” have been able to establish such a stronghold in New Zealand, convincing so many New Zealanders that the world is under threat from a gas that is essential for life on earth. So powerful is their grip that the new government appears determined to cement in climate change policies that will cost the country dearly in wasted time, energy and money, while having virtually no effect on the climate.

It is fair to say that when fears of global warming first surfaced, most people were confused. In New Zealand carbon dioxide is not regarded as a dangerous gas – nor as a pollutant – but as a minor component of the atmosphere that plays a major role in life on earth. Carbon dioxide is the gas used by green plants during the process of photosynthesis when the sun’s energy is trapped and converted into a food source. Calling carbon dioxide a pollutant is not only factually wrong, it is dangerously misguided!

We also know that since the earth was formed some four and a half billion years ago, the climate has been continually changing from warm cycles, when the temperature has been many degrees hotter than it is at present – with carbon dioxide levels far higher than they are today – to cooling cycles, when the earth has plunged into ice ages.

In light of this, when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) first announced that there was an unprecedented build up of man-made carbon dioxide and that it was going to cause catastrophic global warming, it sounded completely unbelievable, and was casually dismissed as fanciful. Then the former US Vice President Al Gore, Chairman of Generation Investment Management – a major commercial beneficiary of global warming scaremongering – began his global campaign to promote the threat of catastrophic climate change. His major prop was his movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, in which he demonised man-made greenhouse gases – especially carbon dioxide – through his infamous “hockey stick” graph which shows the earth heating up to calamitous proportions, with melting snow, ice and glaciers causing sea level rises that would flood cities and countries, causing general mayhem and massive loss of life.

The movie created global alarm, exacerbated by claims that there were 4,000 IPCC scientists and expert reviewers who backed up the findings on which Al Gore’s movie was based. The movie even won an Oscar for best documentary (despite it being more fiction than fact and more a drama than documentary), and IPCC contributors a Nobel Prize.

With such unstoppable momentum, politicians eagerly jumped on the global warming bandwagon wanting to be seen to be helping to save the planet. And in response to the inevitable questioning and criticism by the growing numbers of people who understood that such climate change alarmism was fundamentally flawed, the catch-cry became “the science is settled’ and, there is an overwhelming consensus of scientists who agree with the hypothesis of human-caused global warming – in other words, “4,000 IPCC scientists can’t be wrong”!

The end result has been the implementation of a raft of climate change agreements and policies that are designed to heavily tax and ration hydrocarbon energy, since man-made greenhouse gases are key by-products of industrialisation and agricultural production – thereby slowing the progress of mankind. The Kyoto Protocol, which requires massive reductions of greenhouse gas emissions under threat of costly penalties, is the prime upshot. Complying with the ambitious carbon dioxide target reductions has given rise to a raft of climate change mitigation proposals such as emissions trading schemes, carbon taxes, renewable energy projects, and so on.

The problem is that while massively increasing the cost of goods and services – and reducing economic growth at the very time when increasing growth and jobs should be global priorities – these schemes will have virtually no effect on climate, because it is not man-made greenhouse gases that are driving climate change. In fact, if man-made greenhouse gases were driving climate change, given that their concentrations have increased steadily over the last ten years, the global temperatures should have continued to rise. Instead, for ten years now the climate has been cooling, driven by numerous other factors including the lack of sunspot activity on the sun, which hardly gets even a mention in the IPCC reports.

Complicit in what is increasingly being called an international scam, are the various branches of the media which sensationalise the ordinary in the interest of “news”, ignoring their vows of fact over fiction. As a result they have failed to adequately report on the mounting scientific evidence that man-made greenhouse gases have a negligible effect on the climate.

Similarly, some of those in the business sector are prepared to turn a conveniently blind eye to the hoax. At the forefront of the global warming merry-go-round is Al Gore and others who have invested heavily in green businesses and are fighting tooth and nail to keep the sceptical science community at bay in order to ensure their green empires continue to grow at the expense of a gullible public.

However, many businesses and industries that will be badly effected by the introduction of emissions trading schemes and the like, have remained silent, loathe to speak out too forcefully in case they are labelled as irresponsible corporate citizens by mad environmentalists who have the power to create damaging adverse publicity.

So where does all of this leave New Zealand?

The definitive change in government last November raised hopes that the new administration will take a more pragmatic – and honest – approach to this issue. With the global financial crisis seriously threatening our whole economy, the last thing New Zealand needs is for the government to allow green ideology to over-rule reason and damage our economy even further – especially when much of what has been passed as facts in this matter is instead fiction.

According to John McLean, a Melbourne based climate data analyst, the 4,000 scientists that the IPCC claim support their hypothesis that humans are having a significant influence on climate, is overly exaggerated – when duplicates are removed as well as those who support the creation of the reports, not the findings, the number falls to only about 60![2] Meanwhile, with over 31,072 scientists from the US alone having signed a petition utterly rejecting claims that human induced greenhouse gases are causing global warming, the claims of a “consensus” on this matter are totally wrong.[3] it is the same story with claims that the “science is settled”. One of the most distinguished scientists in the US, Emeritus Professor S. Fred Singer, spearheaded the Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate, which provides an independent examination of the evidence on climate change that is available in peer reviewed literature. The report concludes that the human activities are not influencing the global climate in a perceptible way, that global climate change is unstoppable, and that we should not even try to influence it!

In December last year, at the UN climate conference in Poland, Al Gore made a keynote address in which he called carbon dioxide “global warming pollution” and repeated many of the claims made in his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”, which, in 2007, a British High Court Judge had found to be factually incorrect.

This week’s guest commentary Gore: Yet another “moment of fateful decision” is a critique of Al Gore’s speech by Lord Christopher Monckton, a business consultant and policy advisor, in which he exposes these errors:

“In October 2007 a High Court judge in the UK ruled that Al Gore’s fanciful film, An Inconvenient Truth, depicted “an Armageddon scenario that … is not based on any scientific view”. Yet Gore deliberately persists in repeating the errors listed by the judge in that case. There are now serious discussions afoot to lodge complaints against Gore to the federal financial and legal authorities, in that he fraudulently talks up the imagined “climate crisis” in the hope that he and his “green” investment corporation can profit by the baseless alarm that his falsehoods generate. If that was his hope, it was vain. In the current financial crisis (which, unlike the climate “crisis”, is real), so-called “green” investments have fallen in value nearly twice as far as all other investments. Certainly, it is a serious matter that Gore continues to attempt to profit at the expense of the gullible by peddling falsehoods specifically identified as erroneous by a High Court Judge, who, unlike most of Gore’s audience, had been compelled to hear both sides of the case and had decided that Gore’s side was in at least nine material respects erroneous”.

With governments around the world putting their climate change plans on hold, as concerns shift from the environment to the economy, New Zealanders should be able to expect that our new government will follow suit. In fact, there is a strong expectation that the Select Committee review announced as part of the coalition agreement between National and ACT will properly investigate the scientific basis of man-made climate change. With that in mind, if you have a view on whether you agree with the 31,000 US scientists who believe that there is no scientific evidence for global warming, why not put in a submission? You have until February 13 to do so – see the sidebar for details.

In a democracy, politicians are forced to listen to public opinion. If you feel strongly about this issue, then put in a simple submission in which you give the new government some guidance on whether they should be re-introducing an emissions trading scheme or whether they should be putting it permanently and irreversibly on hold!